AirRaid
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RE: Its too bad Rice doesnt have a good following
(08-13-2013 01:33 AM)randaddyminer Wrote: (08-12-2013 07:04 AM)AirRaid Wrote: (08-12-2013 03:24 AM)randaddyminer Wrote: (08-11-2013 11:04 AM)Cougar Hippy Wrote: (08-11-2013 10:08 AM)Afflicted Wrote: Absurdity
Rice will not break 30k unless playing UH/UT/A&M. You don't even break 30k when playing Big 10 or Pac 12 teams. There is nobody on your home schedule that will break 30k. If UH is ranked, undefeated or simply decent and if Cincy is ranked, undefeated or simply decent, HRS will be sold out (the 47k capacity not the 70k obviously) or at the very least, over 40k.
One year removed from a 12-1 season, Houston only managed to break 30k once... Their home opener. The rest of the UH games averaged 25k
Our attendance sucks, but to be honest, it dropped because of the Texas State loss and 0-3 start, which killed any excitement for the fanbase. We still would have averaged 30k if we went 5-7 but hadn't lost to Texas State. If you look at the 2010 numbers, we went 5-7 but still averaged 30k+ Texas State loss was the major dip that caused this to happen. Still averaged 27.2k for the season, not including the Rice home game at Reliant, but all in all our attendance sucked.
A Houston fan posted on here (cusabbs) during the 2010 season that one of your alumni was buying up tickets to give to the student body. I personally think he was buying up all unsold tickets to inflate attendance numbers, because the 2010 season coincides with the year Houston began to make a hard push to get into a BCS conference. The year before (2009) Houston went 10-4 and averaged 25k and had one game over 30k (Texas Tech at 32k).
I don't know why hippy thinks he is in position to bash Rice.
I don't know who told you that, that sounds super fishy and unlikely. Most of the time message board banter is generally people talking about being some kind of "insider" or a "booster" is just them talking out of their butt cheeks. But anyway, this premise is false because students get in free with their ID, so don't need tickets from anybody to get in, whoever wrote is making things up.
(08-13-2013 02:09 AM)Volkmar Wrote: AirRaid, you seem to be much more sensible than Cougar Hippie. To answer your West Virginia inquiry though, I wouldn't call West Virginia fair-weather simply because for starters, it's a school of 30K (10K less than Houston), and typically gets around 60K for football games to begin with. That's twice the size of the school's enrollment. Even if it drops to 50K by a season's end because of some losses, we're still talking about 50,000 fans from a school with an enrollment of 30K in a very small town that's a full hour away from a city of any stature. And btw, that city happens to be Pittsburgh, Pa, so we're in fact even talking about another state.
Proportionally speaking, it would be like UH's 40K campus typically getting 80K in attendance for all their games, but dropping to about 67K in lean times. That's just not gonna happen with you guys, perhaps ever! You should be so lucky to have such numbers even in lean times. Plus, when you consider the monstrosity of the Houston metro area, it should be easy for you guys to draw big crowds anyway. But you still don't. I shudder to think of what kinds of numbers UH would have if not for the 6 Million + metro area the campus is situated right in the middle of. There's just no comparison at all between WVU and UH in terms of their football faithful. And one of the craziest things about it all is that football is like another religion in Texas. We're talking about a FOOTBALL MAD state, well except for UH apparently.
Let's even say that next year when the beautiful new 40K stadium is built, that attendance will get a generous boost to about 35-37K. It still doesn't even equal your schools enrollment, while Rice and West Virginia's attendance numbers FAR outnumber their enrollment even in lean times.
Let me debunk this. Just because you live in a giant city, doesn't mean you draw well. Its actually the opposite, generally city schools for whatever reason, draw worse, such as Pitt, Cuse, Ga.Tech. and Cincy, and these schools were in AQ conference as well. The fact that football games in small towns are the sole attraction around, helps them strengthen their fanbase as the games become a weekly event rather than just a football game. WVU also has the luxury of playing Big 12 teams week in and week out, that helps them draw well. Being in an AQ conference is VERY important for big attendance atleast for city schools. Look at TCU, three years ago, they had 13k season ticket holders in the MWC, today they have 31.6k with a Big 12 membership.
Us Go5 schools don't have that luxury of playing good teams, which is why our attendance tends to falter more than P5 schools. Most people that come to UH games are alumni/students and not casual houston football fan, because casuals they can sit home and watch A&M and LSU play big boy football which UH can't provide by being in Go5. The only way UH draws casual fan and tap into the 6M population is by getting into a P5 conference, which our admins also pushing hard for. UH admins have their share of mistakes and by no means I think we draw well certainly for a school of our size. My only point is that last year was not an accurate representation of the health of the fanbase, we have climbing upwards since 2005 and that is not stopping anytime soon because our admins have turned the ship around.
(This post was last modified: 08-13-2013 03:33 AM by AirRaid.)
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Its too bad Rice doesnt have a good following
